


A Place to Call Home

by Pontmercyingtilthecowscomehome



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Cassian Andor-centric, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Removed the age gap in cannon so they are only two years apart, Slow Burn, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies, Vignette, can be read as friendship fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-28
Updated: 2019-06-28
Packaged: 2020-05-28 07:53:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,854
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19389778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pontmercyingtilthecowscomehome/pseuds/Pontmercyingtilthecowscomehome
Summary: Small moments between a boy from Fest and a princess from Alderaan.





	A Place to Call Home

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cassandor](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cassandor/gifts).



“Where am I?’ the boy asks, first in the language of his home world, the language of snow and smoke and soft hopeful things. The language he has mostly abandoned, because it belongs to a world that abandoned him. But it comes to him in the moments between sleep and waking, in the moments between courage and despair, between retreats and advances. The moments where his past is his future is his present, where he is still a young boy and yet still the tired old soldier he has been since his sixth birthday.

No one in the cold grey durasteel room answers him. There is the loud, constant hum of a ship’s engine, but it is not a ship he knows, not one of the battered old relics that survivors of Fest have used in their fight.

He asks it again.

Rubs his eyes. Takes a deep breath, ignoring the pain in his ribs as surely as he ignores the pain in his heart when he chooses the words in clunky, heavy Basic instead. “Where am I?”

No one answers him.

***

“Let me talk to him!” the girl cries out, with the indigent force of a princess who is used to getting her way. They’re in a small room on the refitted cruiser, with a viewing pane that looks into the holding cell where a boy with tousled brown hair and determined eyes sits. They can see him, she knows, but he cannot see them. He thinks he’s alone.

Leia has been alone far too often these days. She refuses to let another child carry that weight. “Papa, we can’t just leave him alone in that room.”

“Leia, darling, he--”

“He’s a boy! He’s my age!” it’s a slight exaggeration, perhaps. But she is a very confident nine year old, even if she is not a very tall one. He couldn’t be much older than her.

Bail Organa sighs and shakes his head, ushering Leia out of the room. She complies, for now.

When she is supposed to be resting in her bunk on the ship, she hears her father speaking to the others aboard the ship, arguing with someone he calls Draven. A small, mischievous smile crosses her face. She slips out of bed, down the hall, and back into that tiny, cold room.

The boy is still awake. Leia stares down at the rows of controls. So many switches, buttons, options. But she is sure of herself, sure as she always is, as if some invisible hand guides her when she needs it most, when she toggles on one switch.

“Hello?” she whispers.

The boy looks up. He can hear her.

“Where am I?” he asks.

“You’re safe,” she tells him, because that’s what her papa always tells her when she wakes from a nightmare. Leia’s nightmares are always the same; a planet of flames, a man crying out, a woman, dark haired, with sad eyes. A battle on a dusty field, with monsters unlike any she’s ever seen. A low, cackling laugh and a dread that creeps around her, threatens to choke her, to pull her under…

Leia shakes her head, refusing to fall into that nightmare. Instead she thinks of pleasant dreams, of a world with bright trees and sapphire lakes, a world she has only dreamed of, though it matched the holos of Naboo she had seen once. Leia has promised herself she will visit there herself one day. To see if it’s as beautiful as her dreams whisper it is.

“Nowhere’s safe,” the boy whispers. “Not now. Not ever.”

Leia frowns. “Not true.”

“It is so.”

She sticks her tongue out, then remembers he cannot see her. He can only hear her say, “you have to have hope things will get better.”

“Hope is for fools,” he snorts.

“I have hope and I’m not a fool.”

“Then what are you?”

“A… A princess.”

He snorts again. “Even worse.”

The silence stretches between them. Papa will return any minute, Leia knows. She’d only come out here to check on him, to make sure he was okay. “What’s your name?”

“Cassian,” he replies. It’s a name like the wind rushing over a high mountain. Leia whispers it to herself. Her name, she thinks, is only half of something. The night sky with no dawn. Something else once belonged with it. Another name. She knows that the way she knows so many things; deep inside herself, most secretly and most assuredly. “Where are you taking me?” he asks.

“Home.”

“I have no home.”

“Then we’ll find one for you.”

Leia wants to tell him more, but the boy slumps against the far wall and closes his eyes. He’s clearly done with the conversation. So, she whispers, “have hope, Cassian,” before she sneaks back into bed.

She is so focused on her own stealthy return that she never notices Bail Organa, her father, watching from the shadows, a smile on his face and tears in his eyes.

‘

***

The boy sits in the library. That’s what he’s learned this vast room is called, filled from floor to high arching ceilings with holobooks. On Alderaan, everything; cups, plates, smiles, warehouses, is full to the brim. There is more than enough for all, a wealth unimaginable to him. It’s one of the reasons he’s more comfortable here in the silent solace of the vast library.

He’s started classes, not with other students, because he was too impatient with their struggles in math and mechanics, but alone. Cassian likes being alone. He likes helping the various droids that he meets in the palace, too. Droids are preferable to people, he thinks, and they’re especially preferable to…

“There you are!” The princess chirps, rushing over to him in a blur of white skirts and long brown hair.

He nods to her, to be polite.

“How are you? Are you settling in to your new home?” she sits next to him, craning her neck to see what holobook he’s reading.

“It’s not home.” Nowhere is.

“It could be!”

“It’s not.”

They’ve had this discussion a thousand times. There’s no way to explain to Leia, though she is not much younger than him, that home is like a sunset. Once it is gone, it is gone forever. He’ll never have a home again. Not after what happened to Fest. All he has now is a place to rest his head, a bag for his small collection of possessions. He refuses to unpack, figuring he never knows when he will need to run. Again.

“I’ve got good news,” Leia says.

“You’re getting another dress?” he retorts. She seems to have more than one for every day of the year. At least, in the past six months, Cassian has never seen her in the same one twice. He tries not to remember the dresses his sisters wore; blurs of blue and pink woven stripes, tassels made from left-over leather scraps, fur lining sleeves that hung like swoops of snow from their shoulders. Cassian tries not to think about his sisters at all.

“No, silly.” Leia pulls out a small datapad and taps through it. “Look!”

“You’ve hacked your father’s messages again.” His tone is flat but he is hiding a smile.

She nods, a blush coloring her cheeks.

The message is short but it is clear. Two more refugees with the last name of Andor have been found. Two young women.

His sisters.

Draven states that they’ve been placed in safe homes on Coruscant, which makes sense. The Rebellion needs spies that can slice and hack and fight, but they also need spies who can flirt and dance and charm Imperial officers out of information.

And Cassian knows his sisters would excel at all of those things. He just hadn’t let himself believe they’d escaped, that they could have survived so much misery.

“Your sisters,” Leia whispers. “They’re safe.”

The boy has no home, but for the first time, he has hope.

***

Leia waits nervously by the closed door at the end of the stone hall deep in the Massassi temple. It had taken her nearly an hour to get here, weaving through crowds of construction teams revamping the massive ancient building to fulfill the Rebellion’s needs. An hour spent undercover, wrapped in a disguise the way Cassian had taught her to, so that even her motions were that of a mechanic, and not a princess.

But the clunky steps of someone weighed down with hydrospanners disappeared the moment she was alone in the hall. Instead, she bolted down it like the girl of sixteen she is.

She knocks once.

The door opens. Wonderful smells rush out. Spices that smell like home, rich and smokey and full of flavor, along with the wild heat she thinks of as belonging to only Festian food, though she knows the peppers he uses are standard issue on numerous world’s rations.

Cassian steps out into the hallway. At eighteen, he’s finally started to fill out the Rebel Uniform, though he is still rather narrow, built more like a nexu and less like a bantha, all lean coiled grace and power. He wipes his hands on a towel and tucks it into his pocket.

“Cassian!” It’s been at least a standard year since they last saw each other.

Leia throws her arms around his shoulders. “You’ve gotten taller, princess,” he says.

“And you've gotten fuzzier!” She pats the scruff on his chin that vaguely aspires to be a beard.

He gives her a droll look. She just smiles at him. “It suits you. The scruffy style.” Leia feels giddy, suddenly, as if there are clouds inside her boots, or a motor buzzing behind her ribs. She feels...alive. More herself than she has been in a while, ever since she was sent off to finishing school. Seeing Cassian reminds her of a thousand adventures on Alderaan, climbing the cliffs and racing through the palace gardens. Leia wonders if he'd still let her win, if they raced now.

“Scruffy?” He raises an eyebrow. “That’s a clear reminder I should spend a little more time shaving, no?”

She just laughs. It’s so good to see him, to know he’s here, on this base, and not out on another mission. It’s a small moment of safety, Leia thinks, before he must go back to whatever the Rebellion asks of him.

“So now that you’ve been promoted, you get your own room?” Leia asks. That had been what Ranza, his eldest sister had said. The two Andor women had a coded line, a way to both funnel information gleaned from cadets to their brother, and a way to tease him when they decided he needed it. Leia was fond of both aspects of the communication, both because of the usefulness to the cause and the joy it brought the women.

“Yes.” Cassian pushes the door open wider to reveal a sparse but decorated room, with a woven blanket on the narrow bunk and a half-rebuilt Imperial security droid in a corner. The single burner contained a bubbling pot of something sure to be delicious, and there was a plate of fresh empanadas on the table, folded Alderaanian style, just for her. Normally, he’d shape them in to the half-moon shape from Fest.

“Welcome,” Cassian says, with a light in his eyes, a light like the hearth fires that once guided Festians back to safety, a pure and gentle light, “welcome to my home.”

***

“Where am I?” his voice crackles low over the communicator. “Le-Commander, please. Center me?”

It’s a request that breaks her heart. It’s one she’ll always answer, though, no matter how much it hurts. . “You’re on Naboo. You’re in a secure apartment. It is the evening, two hours until standard sunset.” Leia pauses, knowing that _where_ is not just about physical location. Not when he asks it like that. “Take a deep breath. Turn to your left. There’s a mirror-holo in the cabinet.”

She waits one count, two, until she hears the whoosh of the cabinet. The exhale as he studies his own face, given back to him now that the job is done. The uniform he had on, she knows, is already shredded and on the floor. He cannot stand the noxious grey weight on his shoulders for even one second after the mission is complete.

“You were born on Fest, on the winter equinox. Your favorite color is dark blue, the same shade as the night sky there before---”

“Before the factories begin for the day,” he says, and it is in a language few speak, though Leia has learned it.

Leia leans into that Festian, into its swirling constants and flowing phrases, all motion and elegance, like the man himself. She thinks, for a moment, that she would give anything to be there on Naboo with him. To see his elegant grace reflected in the serene blue waters of the lakes there, to stroll with him along ancient streets and to debate translations of obscure poetry with him in the libraries she has only ever seen holos of. Naboo is, she thinks, barely more real than a dream to her, and it breaks her heart to know that Cassian is rapidly becoming just as illusory. With each identity they give him; Aach, Fulcrum, Joreth, his own self becomes more spectral, fading away like smoke from a dying fire.

So, in this moment, she fans the flames, gives him back everything. She tells him his favorite poem, the last thing he cooked for her, hums his favorite tune back to him. His breathing steadies as she goes on. Each fact she tells him rebuilds the man he was before this mission. Each detail fills in the outline of the person he abandons each time the Rebellion asks him to. Finally, she finishes. “You are Cassian Andor.”

“Captain Cassian Andor,” he corrects.

She smiles, her first true smile since sending him on the mission. He’s back to himself, returned to the man who is one of her oldest and dearest friends. The man who, as years have passed, grows more important to her. Leia tells herself it is because he is more important to the cause, now that he is a Fulcrum Agent, but she cannot lie to herself for long. Not when that same small sense of _knowing_ , that guiding voice inside her whispers elsewise. Leia has a knack for knowing true things. Leia knows, though she’ll never say it out loud, her feelings for Cassian are just as true as the sunrise on Alderaan.

“Yes. You are.” She says, still with a smile. “Now, come home.”

***

“Where am I?” Leia whispers, stirring in the white blankets. Her head is bandaged, and the bacta drip she is hooked to keeps a slow, methodical hum in the room. Others had brought Leia to safety, here, but at what cost. “Cassian? Where am I?

He doesn’t know how to answer that. He’s not even sure he can answer that. His own existence is so fuzzy, his memory more made of bacta than reality at this point. The past sinks hungry teeth in him, tries to drag him back to a sunny beach, back to cold waters and bright light and--

He shakes his head. He cannot answer what he does not know.

And he knows enough that she won’t be satisfied with the answers he received when he woke and asked that same question. They’d told him short, clipped answers. Safe. In a med bay. Resting.

None of those will be enough for her

She is a princess, not a soldier. She is used to her questions being answered fully. So Cassian answers not the question she asked, but the only one he can answer. “I am here. With you.”

Leia’s hand slides into his. Squeezes once. He squeezes back twice, the same way he had, all those lifetimes ago.

“You’re here?” she says. There is a tremor in her voice that makes him curse the Death Star once more. If it had destroyed Leia’s courage, then its destructive force was far greater than even he had thought. “For real?”

“I am.” It is a promise, made all the stronger by the next one. “And I will not leave your side again.”

If Cassian has been given another chance to live, a chance he did not deserve, he will spend this one protecting her. Because she is both the Rebellion and the last hope of Alderaan, but she is also his friend, his first true friend, lost to him for so long, and that is just as worthy of protection as all the ideals she will represent when she steps outside of the medbay.

Because of course, this place they both inhabit, this moment, is it a tedious thing, lasting only as long as a comet’s trail in the sky. Duty will call both of them, tasks will weigh them down once more, both of them pushed into roles far more weighty than that of spy and princess.

They are survivors now. Figureheads. Metaphorical representation of ideals that neither of them has ever lived out perfectly, but by virtue of simply living, they have become them.

Heroes. That is what they will be called, the one thing Cassian rejected when he first woke in this medbay, when he first asked who he was.

_You’re a hero._ A voice had said.

_Liar_! He’d shouted back, but he had called out in Festian, in the words of a land rich in broken dreams and spent promises. He had gone to Scarif to make a better future and woke in a medbay mired in his own past.

No. He was not a hero. He was nothing. Not even Cassian Andor. Not anymore. He would let that name melt away, the way the factory’s fires had melted even the heaviest snow. He would become someone else, someone no one had heard of, not even Leia, and he would protect his princess from the shadows.

Cassian had promised to never leave her side, true, but a shadow cannot leave one’s side either, even when it cannot be seen.

He will watch over her, protect her, and help her find her way home. Because his home, both the one of his past, and the one he had built for those few small moments on that beach, are gone. And Leia’s Alderaan… that is gone too. But he knows without a doubt, as he knows little else, that Leia will find a home once more. She is made of hope and courage and starlight.

“Leia,” he says.

She turns her head to look at him. Their eyes meet for what feels like an eternity, before she looks away, pain on her face. “My father…”

He wishes he could give her a different answer, the way Leia had given him back his family when they had found his sisters. He wishes a thousand things, but none of them matter except the truth. “He’s gone.”

“Then I am alone.”

“No.” Cassian pushes himself up to seated, burning with conviction. “You must have hope, Princess. You must.”

Leia watches him for a long moment. “I suppose you’re right, Captain. I am not alone.”

“Never.” He promised once more. “I am with you.”

“Until the end?”

“Until the beginning.” The beginning of a new era. A more peaceful one. A just one. An era they had fought for, and so many had died for. A new age, where Leia, and his sisters, and so many others, will be able to find a home.

***

The carbonite glows, illuminating the small dark room on the commandeered ship. Cassian holds his breath. Watches as it melts away, dives forward to catch her when she tumbles from its cruel embrace.

She’s cold. She’s so cold. Cassian wraps her in his coat in one instinctive motion, then pulls her closer to him. “Leia,” he whispers her name, daring to, daring to avoid all the titles and codenames they’ve kept between them these past two years.

Because when he had thought he had lost her, he had realized what else he had kept, not only from her, but from himself. His love for her. It burned as bright as his love for the Rebellion and far more steady. His love for the cause was hot and true and strong, a fire meant for forging and reforging the heart of a man who had failed so often in his commitment to the cause. But his love for Leia, for this woman in his arms, was light and soft and honest, a flame of a candle glistening in an icy window, giving a tired man a place to walk toward, one heavy footstep at a time.

He’d sworn he would get her back, that this snare the Emperor had laid for Leia would not capture her. With Skywalker on Dagobah, with the others scattered to regroup after Hoth, it had fallen to him to follow the bounty hunter. To do what needed to be done so that the princess would never be delivered to the Emperor.

“Leia,” he dares to whisper her name again.

“Where…” she starts, her teeth chattering. Cassian holds her tighter. Leia bites her lip, squeezes her eyes closed. “Who are you?”

He had been the one to ask a question like that once upon a time. Then, he had been the one to ask who _he_ was, the one who needed Leia to remind him he, Cassian Andor, existed. Now? Now he knew who he was, he only needed the courage to say it. “You’re safe,” he began. “And I am someone who…” He cuts himself off. He has no right to say it. She’s a princess, a General, a figurehead.

He’s a spy who haunts the shadows, who hasn’t been called by his true name since the day the Death Star was destroyed. He is smoke and blaster fire and a thousand bad decisions, each one made for what he thought was the right reasons. This choice, though, how could it be right? How could he admit he loved her, knowing that she would never say the same. “You’re safe,” he says again. “And we’re going to get you home.”

“Home?” Leia opens her eyes, blinking up at him. She hasn’t been in the carbonite that long, but the blindness may have affected her. He takes her hand, guides it to his cheek, acting only on instinct and a memory of being called scruffy.

Leia’s thumb strokes his beard and the smallest smile crosses her lips. “Cassian.”

“Yes.”

“Do you know who you are?” she asks, not in that weaker tone she had whispered in, nor in the sharp tone he’d last heard her bark orders on Hoth. But in that lovely, durasteel-wrapped-in-lace, regal voice.

“I... “ he swallows. “I am Cassian Andor.” He’s long since abandoned the word captain. It stopped meaning something to him the day he lost his crew.

“Yes. And , you,” she whispers, and in her voice is all the hope held once by Fest and all the light that once shone from Alderaan, “you are my home.”

**Author's Note:**

> ForestPenguin, this one is for you. For never giving up on this ship, and truthfully, for never giving up on me as a writer either. It's been a long time since I've wrote some fic, but that comment you left this week truly came like starlight into my life, giving me a little path forward for writing.  
> Thank you, friend, for making me feel at home in this fandom.


End file.
